The stories that really matter

One of the teachers I work with brought in English newspapers to work on with her class. She had been under the impression that at least one of them was a tabloid based on the cover picture. The cover depicted a rather scantily dressed beautiful Indian woman and a rather unattractive white woman with short brown hair yelling in a rather frowsy sort of way.

This story, the story about racist slurs made by essentially a nobody on Big Brother in Britain against a really famous Bollywood star was on the headlines. Front page news on five out of the six papers she had. It also happened to be in every news segment I watched on BBC and CNN Intl over the weekend.

I find this fascinating for a couple of reasons. First, it was a rather stupid comment that started it all - this girl just seems to be to be an ignorant idiot who has motormouth syndrome. Not to discount the amount of damage such people can cause, however. But amid all of the problems our world is currently facing, racial slurs against a Bollywood star - and the fallout in India, which was fascinating to hear about - is what has apparently captured the attention of the English press.

Final note: 24 US Servicemen/women died in Iraq on Saturday.